Tom Friedman: What Does Being Right Have to Do With It?

Posted on Jun 13, 2006

N.Y. Times columnist Tom Friedman, speaking on CNN, doesn’t seem to see the problem in his having been spectacularly wrong on almost every major Iraq-related issue for the past four years.

Crooks and Liars:

The transcript’s in. Here’s what Tom Friedman had to say to Howard Kurtz yesterday about Iraq:

You know, the problem with analyzing the story, Howie, is that it doesn’t—everyone, first of all, this is the most polarized story I’ve certainly written about, so everyone wants, basically, to be proven right, OK? So the left—people who hated the war, they want you to declare the war is over, finish, we give up. The right, just the opposite. But I’ve been trying to just simply track the situation on the ground.

Greg Sargent: I don’t know, I kinda think being right on such matters as whether to fight a war might be important. Particularly if you’re Tom Friedman, the man whom wavering liberals trusted more than anyone else in the galaxy to interpret the Middle East for them in the runup to the Iraq war. Whether you were right about that or not should tell us a thing or two about the soundness of your judgments and doctrines. Yet in Friedman’s world, those who were right about Iraq couldn’t possibly have been motivated by reason or sound thinking. No, they were driven by emotion: they “hated” the war.